Simone de Beauvoir — "Woman is not a fixed reality, but a becoming."
Woman is not a fixed reality, but a becoming.
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More from Simone de Beauvoir
"I am better at dry sadness than at cold anger, for I remained dry eyed until now, as dry as smoked fish, but my heart is a kind of dirty soft custard inside."
"The word 'love' has by now been so debased and distorted that it is almost impossible to use it."
"To be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future."
"She has been taught that it is her duty to please, to be charming, gentle, submissive."
"The meaning of life is not to be found in some transcendent realm, but in our concrete existence."
About Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)
French existentialist philosopher whose The Second Sex (1949) is the foundational text of modern feminist theory. Closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre (lifetime partner and existentialist co-founder) and Albert Camus (existentialist contemporary in Paris). For an intellectual contrast, see Camille Paglia, American cultural critic and Sexual Personae author — Paglia argues for biological-essentialist roots of gender that Beauvoir's social-construction view — 'one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman' — explicitly rejects. The two are the cleanest constructed-vs-essentialist poles in feminist theory.
The standard scholarly entry points to Simone de Beauvoir's work: Toril Moi (Duke, James B. Duke Distinguished Professor) — Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman (1994); Margaret A. Simons (Southern Illinois University, Emerita) — Beauvoir and The Second Sex (1999); Kate Kirkpatrick (Oxford, Regent's Park College) — Becoming Beauvoir: A Life (2019). These are the works graduate seminars cite when teaching Simone de Beauvoir.